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making meaning

If you have known me for a little while, you may have heard me talk about one of my most favorite classes from my school daze: Strategies of Chance. In this lovely class, we were instructed to engage in some fairly random activities, such as making top ten lists of anything we thought of, or doing random searches on internet search engines. And then, we made things that were somehow inspired or provoked by the randomness. (The above print was the first piece I made in the class, and my first ever screenprint)

I can become overly preoccupied with meaning. I have difficulty working at jobs wherein I cannot find meaningful substance. That said, I found my job at a coffee shop extremely meaningful for a number of reasons, my spiritual love of caffeine and delight in random conversations with strangers (I did meet my sweetheart through an amusing chance encounter at this job) among them. Over the years I have come to understand that, for me, the most significant way in which to find meaning is to make it. And so, now, that’s what I do with my creative energy. I make things that are beautiful enough to me to inspire me to make more nice looking things. And I love to sell the things that I make, releasing them into the world to grow and change, or maybe just stay the same. What they do after they leave my hands doesn’t matter so much; what matters is that they are gone, and their absence makes room for more creating.

When I get stuck in a creative rut, I love to reminisce about my old favorite class. I trust that the world is always random, and, hence, about to inspire me just around the corner. How amazing is that?